The release of Life with My Sister Madonna  the breathless tell-all
from
the Material Girl's brother, Christopher Ciccone, with writer Wendy Leigh
 couldn't
have been more fortuitously timed. As the book hits stores, the world's most
famous Kabbalah practitioner is fending off rumors of a pending split
from husband Guy Ritchie and of an alleged affair with New York Yankees
slugger
Alex Rodriguez, whom she reputedly "brainwashed," causing the dissolution of
his marriage. So bright is Madonna's star that this jumble of reheated
anecdotes warranted an initial print run of 350,000 copies.

What those readers will get is a narrative that reveals less about
Madonna than about the brother condemned to living in her considerable
shadow. Ciccone, an artist and interior decorator, served stints as
Madonna's backup dancer, her "dresser" (a role in which his tasks included
wiping sweat from her sometimes-naked body) and later as her designer. But
mostly, by his telling, he functioned as her doormat. And, occasionally, her
garbage can (one of his chores was allowing his sister to spit cough drops
into his palm). "I find no excuse for Madonna's grossly unfair treatment
of me," he acknowledges. She jilts him repeatedly  summoning him to New
York and then reneging on her offer of a place to stay, or forcing him to
eat half the cost of a set of paintings he purchased at her behest. Yet
Ciccone is unable  or unwilling  to resist her magnetism. They are
no
longer close  but that may be as much her choice
as his.

Madonna is 27 months older than Ciccone, and she snatched his innocence
around the same time she was surrendering her own. She gives him his first
joint, his first ecstasy pill, his first visit to a gay club. These events
foreshadowed a peculiar sort of sibling bond. Consider: Both lost their
virginity in the backseats of cars to guys named Russell. True to form, he
notes, she "bests" him even here: her dalliance took place in a Cadillac,
his in a Datsun. It was clear during her childhood in Michigan, Ciccone
says, that Madonna wasn't shy about deploying her sexuality to get what she
wanted  Bette Midler once called her "the woman who pulled herself up by
her
bra straps." But while his sister wielded sex as a weapon, especially after
dropping out of college to pursue stardom in New York, Ciccone's sexuality
often posed him problems. After he came out to his father, a conservative
Catholic, the elder Ciccone sent Christopher a letter offering to pay for a
psychiatrist to "help you with this problem."

Of course, it's Madonna's love life that readers want the scoop on, and
Ciccone is happy to pry open her bedroom door. He dishes on becoming
Sean Penn's blood brother and Warren Beatty's habit of quizzing him about
what
it's like to be gay. Madonna
bedded so many luminaries, it seems, that some notable members of this
diverse group  John F. Kennedy Jr., graffiti pioneer Jean-Michel
Basquiat, basketball star Dennis Rodman and steroid-user-turned-whistle-blower Jose Canseco  rate no better than a passing mention. Ciccone paints Ritchie
in a
particularly unflattering light, claiming the director's homophobia drove a
wedge between the siblings.

Lurid details aside, the book offers a peek at a man still grappling with
his sister's dizzying fame. Ciccone calls the book a "catharsis," and given
the hurt splashed across its pages, that's easy to believe. But it's hard to
muster a ton of sympathy for a guy profiting handsomely from a hatchet job
on his own sister  regardless of how miserably she may have treated him.